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From the studio

How we moved a content platform off WordPress without losing traffic

Foldworth

WordPress is a good place to start a website. It is often a hard place to grow one.

One of our own ventures is a multilingual review platform in the Nordics: 87 in-depth reviews, three languages and a steady stream of organic traffic from Google. It ran on WordPress for years, and it worked until it didn't. Here is why we moved it, how we did it without losing traffic, and what we would tell anyone thinking of doing the same.

The problem: slow, fragile, hard to change

The site had grown the way most WordPress sites grow: one plugin at a time.

  • It was slow on mobile. Themes, page builders and plugins each added their own scripts and styles.
  • Languages were bolted on. Every language lived in a slightly different structure, which made updates slow and error-prone.
  • Content took too long to keep fresh. Reviews need regular updates: new facts, new pros and cons, new questions. Doing that by hand across three languages did not scale.
  • Every change felt risky. Updating one plugin could break another.

None of these problems was fatal on its own. Together, they meant we were spending our time maintaining the site instead of improving it.

What we built instead

We rebuilt the platform on a modern stack: Next.js for the website, Supabase for the database and Vercel for hosting. Pages are generated ahead of time, so visitors get plain, fast HTML instead of waiting for a server to assemble each page.

Three decisions made the biggest difference.

1. Every URL kept its place

Search rankings belong to URLs. Before writing any code, we exported every page from WordPress and mapped each old address to its new one. Where the address stayed the same, nothing changed. Where it moved, a permanent redirect sent both visitors and Google to the right place.

Each language kept its own natural URL structure, in its own words, instead of a translated copy of the English one.

2. Languages built in, not bolted on

Every page knows which language it is in and which versions exist in the other languages. Search engines see this through hreflang tags, so a Finnish searcher lands on the Finnish page and an English searcher on the English one.

3. AI that drafts, people who decide

We built a two-step content workflow into the admin panel:

  1. Facts first. One button gathers the current factual data for a review and saves it.
  2. Writing second. A second button drafts the review, pros and cons and FAQ, using only the saved facts as its source.

Nothing is published automatically. Each change appears as a side-by-side preview of the old and new text, and a person approves it. Keeping 87 reviews current in three languages went from a project to a routine.

The results

  • Mobile PageSpeed score: 95. Pages arrive as plain, pre-built HTML, with no theme or plugin scripts in the way.
  • Rankings carried over. Every old URL either kept its address or redirects to its new one, so the authority the site had built over the years moved with it.
  • Content updates became a routine. Refreshing a review now means two clicks and a careful read of the changes, instead of manual edits in three languages.
  • No plugin conflicts, ever again. The whole site is one codebase we fully understand.

On a sister site, one fix alone made a striking difference: web fonts loaded from an outside service accounted for most of the page weight. Hosting them ourselves removed almost all of it.

Before you migrate: a short checklist

If you are thinking of moving off WordPress, check these first:

  1. Export every URL, including old posts, categories and images, and decide where each one goes.
  2. Plan the redirects before you build, not after launch.
  3. Keep your titles and meta descriptions, or improve them on purpose, never by accident.
  4. Decide how each language should live: its own URLs, its own words, linked with hreflang.
  5. List what your plugins actually do (forms, tracking, SEO, caching) and rebuild only what you need.
  6. Watch Google Search Console closely for the first weeks after launch, and fix any errors quickly.
  7. Measure before and after: speed, traffic and conversions, so you know the move paid off.

Is it worth it?

Not for every site. If yours is small, fast enough and rarely changes, WordPress may serve you well for years.

But if your site is growing in pages, languages or ambition, and you spend more time maintaining it than improving it, a rebuild can pay for itself quickly.

Thinking of moving off WordPress? Write to us. We have done it for our own ventures, and we can do it for yours.